Though the Colombian Constitutional Court has had a lead role in granting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) rights since 1998, conservatives mobilizing against LGBT rights between 1991 and 2007 were active in Congress and the streets rather than in court. After 2007, however, conservatives have maintained consistent opposition to rights claims made by LGBT people in the Constitutional Court. This article draws from fieldwork examining the significance of the Constitutional Court’s transition from granting rights to LGBT people as individuals to granting rights to LGBT people as couples and potential families to theorize conservative legal mobilization, particularly moral conservatism. To account for the rise of conservative legal mobilization against LGBT rights in Colombia in 2007, this article expands on the legal opportunity structure model. It theorizes that legal threats––that is, changes in legal rules that are perceived to increase the costs of mobilization or the expected costs of not taking action––are among the factors that lead movements to engage in legal mobilization, even if legal opportunities are not expanding.

The 1876 British Cruelty to Animals Act introduced an unprecedented administrative system to supervise any experiment “calculated to give pain” to a living animal. The act, which was in force for a hundred years, established a tight system of control over animal experimentation, including a small, but vigorous, inspectorate. This article explores the relations between bureaucracy and the production of knowledge through the correspondences, memos, and notes taken by two principal inspectors under the act. The inspectors belonged to the worlds of both law and science. Coming from within the scientific profession, their close ties to medical social circles not only evoked critique but also helped them fulfill their tasks and gain access to research laboratories. Archival records examined here for the first time show that, although the inspectors downplayed animals’ pain in physiological laboratories, the inspectorate played an important role in shaping the experimental space and practice, thus facilitating the production of “ethical scientific facts.” The inspectors’ work modeled the new legal regime of animal experimentation regulation, making them indispensable agents in the act’s coproduction of knowledge and public order.

This study analyzes prison admission and crime data to assess whether the penal system’s response to crime has continued to intensify since mass incarceration’s peak and whether the increasing use of prison in nonurban areas helps explain this trend. The findings show that penal intensity has continued to escalate despite falling crime rates and widespread efforts to reduce prison populations. Further, the justice system’s response to crime is most vigorous in nonurban, and especially rural, counties, where more felony arrests for all types of offenses result in a prison sentence. Although not new, this geographic difference has grown in recent years. While penal intensity thus varies notably within states, case outcomes also vary markedly across states. Comparative case studies of dynamics in a highly punitive state (Kentucky) and a less punitive state (Washington) show how formal law interacts with local dynamics not only by creating “statutory hammers” that are utilized by zealous prosecutors and judges but also by limiting the impact of aggressive prosecutorial practices on prison sentences.

Drawing on social-movement and sociolegal theorizing, we investigate legal-framing innovations in the briefs of reproductive-rights cause lawyers in prominent US Supreme Court abortion cases. Our results show that pro-choice activist attorneys engage in innovative women’s-rights framing when the political-legal context is more resistant to abortion rights for women, that is, when the political-legal opportunity structure is generally closed to reproductive-rights activism. We consider reproductive-rights framing in three types of pivotal abortion cases over the last half-century: challenges to limitations on public funding of abortion, challenges to regulations that include multiple restrictions on abortion access, and challenges to bans on second-trimester abortions. Our analysis proceeds both qualitatively and quantitatively, with close reading of the briefs to distill the main women’s-rights frames, a count analysis using text mining to examine use of the frames in the briefs, and assessment of the political-judicial context to discern its influence on cause-lawyer legal framing. We conclude by theorizing the importance of the broader political-legal context in understanding cause-lawyer legal-framing innovations.

The right to privacy has long been regarded as a liberal progressive principle, one that guarantees gender-based equality and liberty in the domain of reproductive rights. Since the US Supreme Court’s renowned articulation of privacy in Roe v. Wade, privacy’s opponents have condemned the right as an illegitimate judicial invention with no basis in the Constitution. This article addresses the puzzle of why a coalition of Christian conservative legal organizations, conservative foundations, Trump administration officials, Republican party lawmakers, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists has assembled to redefine the right to privacy in service of anti-transgender politics. While much attention has been paid to the proliferation of religious liberty-based challenges to the rights of sexual and gender minorities, these accounts miss how central the fight to reassociate privacy has become in conflicts waged in state and federal courts, city and state legislatures, and ballot referendum campaigns. Although this coalition eschews any mention of Roe or reproductive rights, it does adopt a substantive due process-based interpretation of privacy’s mandate despite the typical conservative disdain for that doctrine. Additionally, the coalition frames its project as one that balances competing rights claims by defending (cis) women’s rights against allegedly lopsided trans-inclusive reforms.

Digitization and the release of public records on the Internet have expanded the reach and uses of criminal record data in the United States. This study analyzes the types and volume of personally identifiable data released on the Internet via two hundred public governmental websites for law enforcement, criminal courts, corrections, and criminal record repositories in each state. We find that public disclosures often include information valuable to the personal data economy, including the full name, birthdate, home address, and physical characteristics of arrestees, detainees, and defendants. Using administrative data, we also estimate the volume of data disclosed online. Our findings highlight the mass dissemination of pre-conviction data: every year, over ten million arrests, 4.5 million mug shots, and 14.7 million criminal court proceedings are digitally released at no cost. Post-conviction, approximately 6.5 million current and former prisoners and 12.5 million people with a felony conviction have a record on the Internet. While justified through public records laws, such broad disclosures reveal an imbalance between the “transparency” of data releases that facilitate monitoring of state action and those that facilitate monitoring individual people. The results show how the criminal legal system increasingly distributes Internet privacy violations and community surveillance as part of contemporary punishment.

The catastrophic failure of the prison system in the United States has prompted a shift in criminal punishment system rhetoric and policy toward reform. Numerous programs and initiatives facilitate reentry for the hundreds of thousands of individuals coming out of prison every year, but these and other reforms remain problematic. They do little to improve the social and material conditions of those attempting to reintegrate. By failing to question the social, historical, political, and economic conditions of criminal system problems, they reproduce the oppressive social conditions that they are intended to address. This article diagnoses several major issues with conventional reform efforts in rehabilitation and reentry scholarship and praxis and argues that what is needed is not further attempts to improve these reforms but, rather, an approach that considers these problems through an abolitionist lens. An abolitionist frame, I suggest, is particularly useful in articulating suggestions for change. I apply an abolitionist analysis to an examination of reentry, illustrating how abolitionism helps to diagnose problematic reentry reforms and how an abolitionist approach to reentry can address these issues in a more effective, profound, and enduring way.

The growth of judicial power globally has renewed scholarly debates about who benefits from increased judicial authority. Using original data, we examine the full universe of constitutional free expression decisions issued by three apex courts—in Colombia, India, and South Africa—across three categories of disputes that feature a diverse array of rights claimants. By so doing, we shed light on the limits of elite-driven accounts of judicial empowerment. We find that even where constitutional courts are empowered by elites seeking to advance their own interests, activist courts can develop a practice of rights-protection that benefits a diverse range of less powerful actors. Moreover, regardless of whether the speech claimants are elite or non-elite actors, these three apex courts regularly rule in favor of free expression for dissenting or unorthodox speech acts. In sum, where issues are peripheral to the governing regime’s core interests, relatively powerless actors are sometimes able to use legal processes to advance their rights and interests.

Over the last century, Japanese consumers have steadily lost their taste for sake. Several large producers dominate the mass market through economies of scale, but the regional brewers have gradually gone out of business. In this environment, a small group of enterprising regional brewers began to create a market for premium sake with the environmental variations so important to French terroir.

To produce this terroir sake, brewers must convince local farmers to grow high-risk and high-cost varieties of rice optimized for premium sake. The challenge involves unusually complex incentive and informational requirements. Yet the parties almost never draft elaborate contracts with verifiable terms, and rarely vertically integrate. Instead, they build dense and refined networks of social capital among themselves and combine short-term renewable (and hence terminable) contracts, extremely high (efficiency-wage level) prices, and close monitoring by the brewer. In the process, they give the farmers strong incentives to let the brewers intervene as needed in the farming.

The brewers and farmers neither draft elaborate contracts nor vertically integrate for a simple reason: they do not need to do so. The combination of dense networks of social capital, terminable short-term contracts, and high prices gives them all the flexibility they need.

This article examines why deportation and imprisonment for immigration offenses rose under presidential administrations that claimed to favor more “humane” approaches to immigration enforcement. I examine the politics of enforcement discretion on the US-Mexico border during the administrations of Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and Barack Obama (2009–17). Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I argue that the Clinton and Obama administrations took a punitive humanitarian approach to enforcement discretion aimed at punishing “illegal immigration” at the border while protecting “legal immigrants” with long-standing ties to the United States from deportation. The findings show that such an approach extended crime control to US-Mexico border enforcement. This blend of humanitarian and punitive approaches systematized criminal enforcement priorities and expanded the discretion of border agents to deport and imprison. Just as other scholars have shown how liberal reform contributed to the rise of the carceral state, this article shows how immigration policies that blended humanitarianism and security punished the very people such policies were designed to protect.

Lawyers play an important role in mobilizing rights, yet the lawyer-client relationship can be challenging to navigate. This is especially true for immigrants who face barriers to accessing rights and protections. Undocumented status multiplies existing challenges, enhancing the need for an advocate. Based on sixty-six interviews with low-wage immigrant workers (thirty-one documented, thirty-five undocumented) from 2012 to 2014, I reveal how immigration status impacts why and how clients seek legal counsel, the expectations they have for their lawyers, and their eventual sense of satisfaction—or frustration—with their claim. As victims of an enforcement regime and legal system seemingly rigged against them, undocumented clients often have lower expectations of their lawyers and may doubt the integrity of the legal process itself. As a result, they often seemed resigned to follow their attorneys’ lead, minimizing conflict. However, undocumented status also limits labor mobility and generates uncertainty about the future, making claimants more willing to settle claims in order to move on. While they are often willing to come forward, many undocumented claimants nonetheless reject abstract notions of justice in favor of a more pragmatic attitude toward legal mobilization: a certain legal cynicism masquerading as client satisfaction.

Drawing upon an analysis of congressional records and media coverage from 1981 to 1996, this article examines the growth of mass immigration detention. It traces an important shift during this period: while detention began as an ad hoc executive initiative that was received with skepticism by the legislature, Congress was ultimately responsible for entrenching the system over objections from the agency. As we reveal, a critical component of this evolution was a transformation in Congress’s perception of asylum seekers. While lawmakers initially decried their detention, they later branded them as dangerous. Lawmakers began describing asylum seekers as criminals or agents of infectious diseases in order to justify their detention, which then cleared the way for the mass detention of arriving migrants more broadly. Our analysis suggests that they may have emphasized the dangerousness of asylum seekers to resolve the dissonance between their theoretical commitments to asylum and their hesitance to welcome newcomers. In addition to this distinctive form of cognitive dissonance, we discuss a number of other implications of our research, including the ways in which the new penology framework figured into the changing discourse about detaining asylum seekers.

This article examines memory laws as a new form of social control, demonstrating the significance of cultural memory to law and society scholarship. It focuses on two Israeli laws that seek to control public debate by giving voice to one marginalized group in order to silence another. The article presents two forms of such utilization of the law: forced forgetting and the balancing of atrocities. Forced forgetting validates the memory of one group of people over another group. Balancing atrocities equates victims, pitting the suffering of one group against that of another for the purpose of dismissing the former’s claims for recognition and redress. The 2011 Nakba Law, an example of forced forgetting, dismisses the Palestinian minority’s experience to amplify the memory of the Jewish majority, while the 2014 Jewish Nakba Law creates an analogy between Palestinian redress claims and those of the Mizrahi Jews in order to balance the atrocities that these groups suffered. We show that both forms of control have limitations that create gaps between legislation and implementation, yet their political-symbolic impact is much greater.

In the 1960s, farmers pressed trespass charges against aid workers providing assistance to agricultural laborers living on the farmers’ private property. Some of the first court decisions to address these types of trespass, such as the well-known and frequently taught State v. Shack (1971), limited the property rights of farmers and enabled aid workers to enter camps where migrants lived. Yet there was a world before Shack, a world in which farmers welcomed onto their land rural religious groups, staffed largely by women from the local community, who provided services to migrant workers. From the 1940s through the 1960s, federal, state, and local law left large gaps in labor protections and government services for migrant agricultural laborers in Michigan. In response, church women created rural safety nets that mobilized local generosity and provided aid. This article uses Michigan as a case study to argue that these informal safety nets also policed migrant morality, maintained rural segregation, and performed surveillance of community outsiders, thereby serving the farmers’ goals of having a reliable and cheap labor force—ultimately strengthening the economic and legal structures that left agricultural workers vulnerable.

The state plays a key role in shaping worker precarity, and employers are key actors in mediating this process. While employers sometimes may act as willing extensions of the deportation machinery, they are also subjects of the immigration state. In this article, we highlight the impact of state-employer dynamics on migrant workers with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). These workers have only provisional permission to live and work in the United States, but are not tied to any single employer. Even though they are privileged over unauthorized workers and employer-sponsored guest workers, TPS holders experience their own brand of state-induced precarity. Their employers risk civil or criminal liability if they are not in compliance with work authorization requirements and must repeatedly navigate an unpredictable and confusing immigration bureaucracy. Drawing on interviews with 121 low-wage TPS workers and two dozen of their advocates in the New York City metropolitan area, our findings reveal that the intertwined coercive and bureaucratic arms of the immigration state together make hiring TPS workers a more risky and costly proposition for employers, thereby exacerbating the job insecurity that TPS workers already face due to an at-will employment regime that offers few protections against firing.

Jury service is one important way that citizens actively involve themselves in the criminal justice system. At a time when criminal justice and legal institutions are suffering from declining levels of public trust, it is crucial to understand the effects of jury service on individuals’ views of the jury system and whether these views vary across different racial groups. This article uses survey data from 248 deliberating and prospective jurors on criminal cases with matched data before and after jury service to examine jurors’ views of jury service. Unlike most research in this area, actual jurors were surveyed both at the beginning and at the end of the jury process to measure changes in attitudes concerning jury participation. Deliberating jurors’ changes in views were compared with a group of prospective jurors not selected for a trial. We found a significant difference between deliberating jurors and prospective jurors concerning their belief that the jury system is the fairest way to decide criminal cases, suggesting that jury service positively affects jurors’ views of the jury system. Racial group membership did not significantly influence change from pretrial to posttrial views, with views of jury service becoming more positive for both white and nonwhite jurors.

Advocates have long observed that sexual minority women are treated less favorably than sexual minority men under US asylum law. However, there has been little empirical examination of these claims in a US context. We offer the first systematic comparative empirical analysis of 199 asylum decisions for cisgender sexual minorities. Using quantitative metrics to contextualize in-depth qualitative analysis, we show that even when cisgender sexual minority men and women face very similar types of violence, women’s claims are adjudicated differently. This is particularly stark in courts’ treatment of sexual violence but is also evident in determinations of generalized persecution and individuals’ sexualities. When women attempt to use laws that are structured around straight, white, Western male perspectives and experiences, their pathways are limited and sometimes nonexistent. Although the flexibility in this area of asylum law has allowed many types of new claims, these changes have mostly benefited those assigned male at birth, and this surface malleability has ultimately worked to maintain law as a regulatory structure. Even with seemingly progressive changes in asylum law, the law itself continues to uphold race, gender, and sexuality as durable social structures and does little to ameliorate inequalities along these axes of social difference.

Although authoritarian states have expanded their tools to surveil citizens and spread disinformation, we know little about how political lawyers have mobilized to resist such covert strategies. Based on semi-structured interviews with Russian lawyers and open-government consultants, this article examines how political lawyers oppose three emerging authoritarian tactics of the Russian government: running disinformation campaigns by “troll factories,” wiretapping, and hiding information on government activities and public services. I find that, despite the repressive legal environment, lawyers have considerable success in developing legal and nonlegal strategies to hold government to account. As autocrats rely on information control to portray themselves as capable leaders, political lawyers and open-government consultants use audits and rankings to undermine political reputations. These findings from Russia may be broadly applicable to new authoritarian states in general.

In 2014, the provincial government unveiled a new courthouse in Thunder Bay, Ontario, featuring a conference area designed to emulate an Anishinaabe roundhouse. The “Aboriginal Conference Settlement Suite” epitomizes efforts to support Indigenous justice within the criminal justice system. However, despite similar efforts in the past, the circumstances of Indigenous peoples in Canada have not improved. This ongoing commitment to legal solutions is emblematic of mainstream views of law as a problem-solving instrument. Notwithstanding awareness of its failings, law reformers remain dedicated to using law as a tool for social change. Employing a case study method focusing on the new courthouse, I challenge a prevailing wisdom that law reform outputs are manageable and in our control. I argue that similar to a courthouse, which is a concrete, physical structure as well as a symbol of justice, so too is the legal instrument both material and metaphorical, with concrete outcomes and symbolic forms. While treating law as a literal tool may give law reformers a longed-for sense of mastery, this approach belies law’s diffuse constitutive power and the various paradoxes in reformers’ actions. Accepting law’s dual nature is essential for candid and accurate assessments about the possibilities and limits of change through law.

Through their professional education and training, new lawyers are generally encouraged to adopt a civic vision of professional identity. This article explores convergences and divergences in how new lawyers entering an increasingly globalized legal profession conceive of their civic roles in different national contexts. In particular, I draw on interviews and a cross-cultural identity-mapping method to examine the lived experiences of civic professionalism among corporate-lawyers-in-training in the United States and China. I found that professional identity formation in the US sample is largely marked by role distancing and a sense of constrained public-interest expression. In contrast, Chinese respondents generally identified strongly with their civic roles, while framing their public contributions in pragmatic, state-aligned terms. I conclude with a comparative analysis of young lawyers’ bottom-up efforts to expand their civic impact.